The battery capacity of mobile devices such as tablet computers and smart phones is extremely important to the consumer's satisfaction with the device. A single/full charge of a battery may need to last 6-8 hours in order for the consumer to use the device while on the go. Each manufacturer of these devices has poured significant resources into implementing techniques to reduce the power consumption of the device in order to extend the life of the battery during operation. Separate power management chips may be used to power gate certain components of the device. In addition, software solutions have been implemented to reduce the power consumption of the device, such as by reducing the number of active threads in a low-power mode or reducing the brightness of a display.
Typically, a significant portion of the energy consumed by a mobile device is devoted to powering a display device. For example, a backlight of the display may draw a significant amount of power to turn on at the brightest setting. In addition, one or more graphics processing cores in a graphics processing unit (GPU) or system-on-chip (SoC) may be dedicated to generating pixel data for presentation on the display device. This activity may rapidly drain the battery, rendering the mobile device inoperable after only a short period. Thus, there is a need for addressing this issue and/or other issues associated with the prior art.